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I've also made available at AmazonBIG BAD WOLFa COS Commando book, an earlier manuscript about Killian Nicholas Langley. You can sample the first five chapters right here. EBOOK now available for KINDLE, NOOK, and at SMASHWORDS for $4.99.
I appreciate all your emails. If you'd like to buy Virtually His NEW, please contact me. Thank you.

Follow The Glow

Sunday, April 17, 2005

FTP problem begone, yeeha! I was telling a friend today that this was the first Sunday in eight months that I didn't have anything really pressing to do (except housework, but that's more de-pressing than pressing). The first thing on the agenda was eat. Then read. I haven't read a book in a month and my new year's resolution was to read at least one book every month. One would think that's an easy promise to keep but I broke that last year ;-(.

Anyway, the book of the month is Marjorie Liu's Tiger's Eye, a paranormal about shapeshifters ala X-Men. It's gotten great buzz and I'm really looking forward to reading it! I love paranormals, especially ones with alternative history.

Since last August, I have gone through three spectacular hurricanes (yes, I live in sunny FL.), repaired a thousand roofs (okay, not that many), nursed one very sick dog (she suddenly turned diabetic), did a book tour that covered five states, bought a new car and television for the first time in ten years, wrote two books (one through a hurricane using the car battery), rushed through revisions and galleys, and created two new jobs for myself (the Blogs). That's...counting fingers...nine months. No wonder I feel funny and empty this morning!

I still can't believe I wrote two books in ten months. If you'd told me that two years ago, I would have said that'd be an impossible thing for me. I'm usually a slow writer, averaging, if I'm lucky, four pages a day at lunch time. I mull alot. That is a nice way of saying I procrastinate ;-). I don't plot, so I usually don't even know where I'm going at the latest point of the story. It's a scary feeling when there's a deadline looming and you have no idea where the story is heading!

But today, I can say...I did it! I wrote two books in ten months!! Hurrah!

It didn't come without a price, though. I had to ignore a LOT of things while I tried to keep my focus on both roofing and writing. The messy house, bills, email, site/newsletter updates, friends, family--everything was late, late, late. Now that I'm done, I wish I have a magic wand to take care of all the stuff I've ignored!

The thing about writing for a career is, I've got to learn to be more methodical in my approach. Some writers sit in a cafe all day; some have their own special hours to write. For years, all I have is my lunch time in a diner and that isn't much time at all. To get more pages, I needed to learn to write at night too. As well as in the morning ;-).

It's like the new rules to figure skating. It's no longer a 6.0 routine, in which the skaters do their program out on the ice. Now everyone in that discipline is counting elements and points to make a certain score. They jump more because, of course, jumps add to the points. They add things into their program that aren't meant to enhance the beauty, but rather, because they make it more 'difficult', so, more points. Unfortunately, when I look at the score of 163.80, I can't tell how that program is, since a skater can fall and still get points....

Hmm, I have no idea why I started that whole line of thought about figure skating. I didn't mean to make the writing-under-a-deadline process as bad as that. But definitely, I now concentrate more on making sure I have a certain page count a day/week. I find myself going, in the middle of driving to work, "four more weeks, okay, I'm behind 30 pages, so I have to add one extra page a day to make up for those...". If you wonder how successful I was at this system, it became, as the book progressed, "seven more days, and 80 pages behind...so I need..." Hahahaha. It sounds funny now, but at that time, I was deadly serious.

They say that one learns more about how to write as one continues on this magic endeavor. For me, it's the complete opposite. Each book, I learn how not to write ;-).

Anyway, today is my day to do whatever I want! Even lie in bed all day--which, of course, my Alpha-spies don't do, unless there's someone they want in it ;-).

Bear with me while I learn. The first button likes the POST. The second button likes the BLOG site. Please help me by "liking" me. Thanks!

2 comments:

Just bought Facing Fear and then plan to move onto your SEAL books. I always love hearing an author say she doesn't plot - makes me feel better about my own SEAL characters who refuse to be pinned down *ggg*

Yes, I am an unabashed pantser. I let my characters do whatever they want and hope for the best ;-). I tried plotting before and it just didn't work for me because once I was done...I couldn't write the darn book!

Thank you for buying FF! I hope you enjoy it! Do let me know, email or otherwise. I enjoy feedback....

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